COMEDY IS TRAGEDY PLUS TIME, and I'm telling you, not enough time has passed. Two years now and my friends automatically start cracking up when anyone says, "How's your cabin?"

I just get mad. I don't get the joke, presumably because I am the joke. All I wanted to do was stop talking about, and finally build, a cabin. Yet when you reach the end of this story, I won't have driven one nail.

It's not really my fault, this boondoggle. Real estate is more or less the male biological clock. There is some hardwired imperative that kicks in at a certain point, the way caribou migrate and birds sing. Around the start of their fifth decade, men suddenly discover gardening. They plant trees. They lay down fence lines. They construct and hold. Like a spoiled child, we say, This is mine. Mine, mine, mine.

Building a cabin in the wilderness is a nearly universal dream. Honestly, if you haven't had it at some point, there's something wrong with you. In college, I wasted hours with my buddy Tim arguing over where we would build our dream shack. Montana? Oregon? Hawaii? Years later, he came back from New Zealand, raving about how we could build it there.

Reality intrudes on such plans. Tim went into finance and worked long hours to support his five kids. I spent those years wandering everywhere without coming to roost anywhere. I never found that piece of peace and quiet I'd been imagining.

And then the clock started ticking. In my late thirties, my only assets—a tiny Manhattan sublet and a rusting motorcycle—came to feel inadequate. The dream cabin, with its imaginary forest, grew slowly into a compulsion. Certainly, it was an inversion of the real life I was leading with a press card in my pocket, working in war zones and Third World quagmires. Whenever something went wrong, which was often, I would catch myself dreaming about the cabin again. A cozy little bolt-hole. Some gentle spot where no one would point a gun at me. A "crucible of calm," as Teddy Roosevelt's place in the Badlands was called.

I started skimming from paychecks. The worse the place or the experience, the more I set aside: $1,000 after a nasty brush with the guerrillas in Colombia; $2,000 for walking into a mine field in Afghanistan; a drug gang in Brazil; teenage muggers in Havana; several Asian insurgencies. All I wanted was the basics: some running water—as in a trout stream—and a star-strewn sky. But after five years, I'd saved a mere $20,000, which wouldn't buy a garden shed in Montana's Paradise Valley.

I looked elsewhere, out of necessity. Oregon had been bid up by Californians; West Virginia colonized by D.C. weekenders; the Adirondacks cheap only in their boggiest, northernmost reaches, five or six hours from New York City. Since anything I could afford was beyond the reach of weekend use anyway, I began to accept what my heart had been screaming all along: Go south, young man!